★★★☆☆
Available for 99¢ on Amazon Kindle
Soul Quest starts off in need of a tough editor, but rounds off to a formidable first publication. Structure problems early on do not stop Amy Jones' story from being suspenseful and touching.
I read Soul Quest on my Kindle for a humble 99¢. When I posted my review on Goodreads, Amy Jones contacted me to thank me for my review. She is a smart, gracious, level-headed woman who can appreciate constructive criticism. I highly recommend Soul Quest because-- while the first acts of the book are a bit shaky-- it pulls together to be what promises to be an engaging trilogy. Plus, you can't really go wrong for less than a dollar.
Soul Quest is one of those books that has a really excellent premise but could have stood to be edited a few more times. I feel like the indie writing community has been really supportive of Amy Jones, but perhaps because of the glowing support, she hasn’t had anyone be honest with her. George Lucas realized after it was too late that he had spent too much money making The Phantom Menace a terrible fuster-cluck of a story. Nobody told him they had doubts because he was freakin’ George Lucas, but the Star Wars book series shows that it could have been saved. Lucas has good ideas, as proven by the original trilogy.
Luckily with books, until they are published or the release date is announced, it’s never too late to fix some major problems. Hopefully, as Soul Quest is the start of a trilogy, Amy Jones can learn from some of the problems with the first book. Soul Quest may have suffered from a lack of a tough editor, but it is in no way irredeemable. I enjoyed the book overall. Everyone needs feedback and editing, even if they don’t have a major publishing house behind them. Amy Jones just needs to find a tough friend to help her hone her ideas.
The premise, that demons (we’ll call them demons for those who haven’t read it) would orchestrate a world event on the scale of 9/11 to start a war and feed off of the suffering of humanity is brilliant. I’m still not sure if it’s too soon to use 9/11, but that was a bold risk and I can’t say I was determinately against it.
The real problem is with the structure. Jones jumps between multiple narrators and relies too much on telling us her backstory rather than showing it. We meet Liv at the start of the book and then jump back in time to just before her birth. This is a smart choice, but one that sets up a missed opportunity.
As we go through the years bringing us back to present, Liv could have been used as an outsider. Characters who were insiders could have taught Liv all of the backstory we needed to know as readers. I think Jones worried that if she didn’t explain it all early on, she’d lose her audience, but I would rather be left curious than read multiple paragraphs coldly explaining how spirits in this universe work. We get back to near-present about 20% of the way through the book (according to my Kindle progress). In the first of a trilogy, that is not too long to wait to really understand what is going on.
Because the narrator changes, I often found myself confused over who was talking. Changing first person narratives need very distinct character voices and not too many of them. A third person narration-- or one that jumped simply between Liv and Beau, would have been easier to manage. She might have lost some opportunity to hear how the head of the oracles felt, but I’m not sure we needed that. Literary critics bash on female writers for talking too much about feelings and not about events. I’m a woman and I maintain that you need to understand emotional processes to understand motive sometimes. We just have to be sure that we try to show feelings rather than tell them, where we can, and that we don’t forget to be concrete about what is actually happening in a scene.
As for formatting, the Kindle version had some flaws. From my own experience, I’m going to guess that return spaces were used where section/page breaks should have been. I found quite a few blank pages between chapters in my read. I also would have liked to see some kind of formatting change between first person, past tense narrative and first person, present tense thoughts. There were a few minor homonym switches (wondering/wandering) that an editor could have caught, as well.
Jones starts off every chapter with a quote. I like it. I’ve been doing the same thing in my book series. Jones isn’t limited to famous Greeks like I am. Jones doesn’t limit herself to pretty, popular, neat inspiration quotes either. She boldly quotes Hitler at a poignant moment.
The descriptions in Soul Quest are quite beautiful. I especially like the description of Arcadia (and that she chose to call it that). Her interpretations of demonic infection, guardian angels, and soul mirrors are clever and serve the story well.
I tend to have a problem in modern fiction when everyone has names that sound like Bratz dolls. It’s my own personal taste and I try to put it aside. Real people have odd names like Brayan, but I like to see them balanced out with normal, common names. That’s probably why I was tickled pink that an oracle, a spirit, a non-human character, was named Kevin. My best friend always wanted to name a hamster Kevin because it was so normal and non-threatening. Naming him Kevin gave me a laugh. I think it’s good when you can find little spurts of joy in something as heavy as a post-9/11 spiritual drama.
As for the characters, I thought they were all very distinct and well rounded. Brayan reminds me of one of my own characters in his heart-breaking insecurity and just as Jones intended, I can’t help but like Laith. I think I liked his narration best. It was sweet, genuine, and distinct. Laith is one of the few characters who isn’t as-smart or smarter than the writer and so his simple diction was refreshing. I am a total Hermione Granger type. Laith’s thought-process was endearing without being too stereotypical slow kid.
More than half-way through you start to see the kids discovering and using their powers. It’s cool, but I feel like it would have been more exciting if we hadn’t gotten a Cerebro File-esque breakdown of their abilities much earlier in the book. Again, I feel like some reorganization and cuts could have made this book a 5-star, easily. By the time the third act was really taking off, I was eager to join the cast and shank the baddie with a light sword in the school cafeteria.
The final act really showed the true potential of this series. Jones writes grief beautifully and genuinely. She has created a cast of balanced, diverse characters and a story I care to see resolved. Soul Quest is an honorable first publication and I believe that I will be reading the next book on my Kindle to see if it gets better.
One last idea. What if this book was subtitled: Soul Quest: The Daeva You Know. Just an idea.
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